Abandoned eFeeders in March.
Photographer: Rosa
Panggabean/Bloomberg
CEO Explains How He Faked Results in $300 Million Meltdown
Agritech venture eFishery was one of Asia’s
brightest startups with money from the likes
of SoftBank and Temasek. Then it all came
crashing down.
As Gibran Huzaifah stared at the Excel
spreadsheet on his laptop, he was
looking into the void. eFishery, the
Indonesian startup he'd built from a
fish-feeding prototype to a 100-employee
extension of himself, was just three
months away from running out of cash.
Slowly, he started plugging fake numbers
into the financial report. Within an
hour, he had done what five years of
hard work couldn’t — turn his business
into a winner, at least on paper. He hit
the send button to show his investors,
certain he’d get caught.
Only he didn’t. His backers were cheered
that his business
was improving. They chipped in more
cash, without realizing the numbers were
fabricated, helping Gibran avoid his
wipeout. It was at that moment in late
2018 he started building a house of
cards that would eventually cost some of
the world’s biggest money managers
hundreds of millions of dollars.
“You see yourself in the mirror and when
you do something wrong, you know that
you’re not proud of yourself,” Gibran
told Bloomberg News during a five-hour
conversation in which he gave his most
detailed public account yet of the
inside workings of eFishery. “I thought
I would just do it to survive.”
Six years after that move to start a
second set of accounts — a real one for
his team and a second, inflated book for
investors — eFishery was one of Asia’s
brightest startups with a valuation of
$1.4 billion
and around 2,000 staff. As well as
providing automated fish-feeders to
boost productivity, it had also expanded
into financing services.
By the time it collapsed, the scheme had
metastasized into a multinational web of
fake shell companies and padded
accounts. The company claimed revenues
of $752 million in the first nine months
of 2024, while the true number was just
$157 million, according to an
internal investigation.
The deceit ensnared several of the
world’s most high-profile venture
players, from Japan’s SoftBank Group
Corp., Singapore’s Temasek Holdings Pte.
and Sequoia India and Southeast Asia (now Peak XV) to Abu Dhabi’s 42XFund and Chamath
Palihapitiya’s
Social Capital. All declined or didn’t reply to
requests for comment.
This account of eFishery's rise and fall
is based on conversations with Gibran
and over 20 eFishery investors, staff
and clients. It charts how Gibran’s
“fake-it-till-you-make-it” deceptions —
commonplace in some corners of the
startup world — spiraled into something
much larger. And it delves into awkward
questions about the role of ego,
groupthink and how so many red flags
were missed in the rush to back a
startup darling. At least $300 million
of investors’ money has been lost. (It’s
unclear exactly how much all individual
funds may have lost and it’s possible
some sold shares at a higher valuation.)
Gibran says he agreed to speak to
Bloomberg now because he wants to state
publicly that he didn’t steal money and
to make clear that the bulk of his
employees weren’t aware of what was
happening.
“I just want to say, my deepest apology
for everyone impacted, especially the
farmers because they’re the reason why I
do this.”
The Starting Point
Gibran was raised near the slums of East
Jakarta, the son of a construction
worker father and a homemaker mother. He
studied biology at the Institut
Teknologi Bandung — known locally as the
MIT of Indonesia. But when his family
struggled financially, Gibran had to
fend for himself. Food was short and he
alternated between sleeping in mosques
and at school, while tutoring for cash,
working in a convenience store and other
side hustles.
Then he signed up for a fish-farming
course and, inspired, rented his own
ponds. He quickly learned the reality;
hard work, slim margins and fickle fish.
1:38
Aquaculture, essentially agriculture in
water, is a grueling business. Spawned
eggs are nurtured in a sequence of pools
before they’re released into larger
ponds and fed calculated quantities of
feed at specific times; too little and
the fish starve, too much wastes money
and can produce excess algae. After
months of attention the fish must be
sold and transported, sometimes live, to
processing locations and buyers. Prices
can fluctuate dramatically.
But Gibran was determined. He opened
warungs
— small eateries — where he sold cooked
fish to increase his profit and lobbied
grocery stores to take his stock. At his
peak, he managed over 70 ponds and
wanted to start a seafood restaurant
chain.
“My dream when I was graduating in 2012
was to own a thousand ponds — I wanted
to be the King of Catfish in Indonesia:
the Rajah Lele,” he said.
One established farmer warned him of a
big pain point in expansion: feeding
becomes a real chore. So Gibran started
working on an automated fish feeder,
doing everything from the welding to the
rudimentary software programing himself.
His early design looked like the student
project it was — a gleaming upturned
milk bucket welded onto a funnel that
gravity-fed fish food pellets onto a
spinning disk. Sending a text message
would open a slide to release the feed,
which then scattered across the surface
of the water.
“I saw the opportunity and that’s why I
changed,” Gibran said. “It’s more
scalable and helps more people.”
For months he rode from farm to farm
down rutted roads and village paths with
a prototype strapped to the back of his
motorcycle. Gradually, as the first
hesitant farmers got harvest gains and
gave testimonials he could cite, it
started to gain some traction.
To build awareness — and win cash prizes
to keep the business going — he entered
startup competitions in Jakarta and
rapidly boned up on the ABCs of venture
capital: how to create a pitch deck,
sell his business model and strike the
right balance of vision and financials
to excite investors. A YouTube clip
uploaded in October of 2013 shows a
baby-faced Gibran at a floating
fish-farm making the pitch that would be
his hallmark till the end: the feeding
process of aquaculture makes up the bulk
of the industry’s costs and his product
could make it much more efficient. In
2015,
Aqua-Spark, a Netherlands-based investment firm
specializing in sustainable aquaculture,
agreed to go in on an initial
fundraising of $750,000.
The First Deception
A big challenge for eFishery was the
high price of its feeders versus the
thin margins for small-scale fish
farming. Depending on size and
discounts, units could cost roughly $400
to $600.
That was beyond the reach of many
potential customers in Indonesia, where
about 10% of the 280 million people live
below the poverty line and where labor
is cheap.
Gibran quickly pivoted to let farmers
rent his contraptions rather than buy
them. He figured he could deploy his
feeders into the market more rapidly
that way and recoup the costs of
building them over a few years. But
because he had to pay for the devices
upfront, it also meant he was burning
through cash.
He trawled the region’s venture
capitalists for interest but was
repeatedly rejected. By December 2017,
the startup had just $8,142 in cash on
hand, according to Singapore regulatory
filings.
Aqua-Spark, though, was still
interested. In May 2018, it offered to
join the Series A round with $1.5
million delivered in three equal
tranches. The last $500,000 would only
come if other investors took part.
The deal bought him time, but still no
one else agreed to join. Furthermore,
Gibran says he believed he was on the
hook for the first million dollars if he
failed to attract other investors. Amy
Novogratz, Aqua-Spark co-founder, said
in a statement there was no personal
liability connected to the agreement.
Dejected, he asked fellow Indonesian
founders how they’d managed to raise new
rounds. The tips were vague and coded,
but the answer, as Gibran took it, was
essentially to fudge the numbers.
“They said that they massage the
numbers, that they have some ‘growth
hacking’ initiatives that they do and
usually they do it prior to the
fundraising,” he said. “I knew it was
wrong. But when everyone is doing it and
they’re still doing okay and never got
caught, you question if it’s really
wrong.”
Gibran presents the decision that faced
him as a morality problem: be honest and
end up bust — or inflate the numbers and
keep the show on the road for himself,
employees and the farmers.
“It’s like a trolley problem and it’s
never an easy choice,” he said,
referring to an ethical thought
experiment where the protagonist can
either run over five people, or change
the track and run over one. “My moral
compass is quite mathematical — if the
number of impacts that I can create at a
given time outsizes the potential risk
and damage that might be created, then
it’s still a net positive and you should
still do it as long as it’s a net
positive.”
The Trolley Accelerates
The shift in sentiment once he emailed
the new numbers was stark. The Series A
fundraising was a huge success,
attracting Singapore-based venture
capital firm Wavemaker Partners and San
Francisco-based 500 Global’s Southeast
Asia fund. The round raised $4 million
in total, including the third tranche
from Aqua-Spark.
Now Gibran had to find ways to back up
the new numbers he’d put into the
spreadsheet. The first system he came up
with was relatively simple. Fish farmers
already bought feed and sold fish, so
Gibran said he offered them a 2% to 3%
payment for them to “move” their
business onto eFishery’s platform.
It was an elaborate sleight of hand. For
customers in the field, nothing changed.
They bought and sold to the same people
at the same prices, using the same
systems they’d always used. But once
those transactions were shifted onto
eFishery’s financial statements, the
startup’s revenue appeared to soar.
“It was only like a 20%, 30% tweak,”
Gibran said. “But it’s important in that
it shows the growth momentum and that
we’re on the beginning on the hockey
stick.”
A bigger gamble was a financing program
called Kabayan that in theory used the
startup’s aquaculture know-how to judge
the credit score of harvesters and get
them loans from lending platforms. The
risk was supposedly limited and eFishery
got a 1% to 3% commission along the way.
Reality was far uglier: eFishery was
responsible for the debts and default
rates were high.
eFishery’s financial statements lodged
in Singapore show revenue leaping from
$185,405 in 2018 to about $10 million a
year later — a 50-fold explosion that
delighted investors. It also went from a
loss to a gross profit over the same
period, attracting term sheets
impossible mere months earlier. With
more cash came rapid expansion: apps for
clients to buy fish straight from
farmers and drop points across disparate
islands to distribute feed and collect
fish.
And it did have an impact on some
farmers. Suganda, who like many
Indonesians goes by one name, was one of
the first in his region of Cirebon, West
Java, to use the eFeeder machine. The
chest-high plastic drums can hold 100kg
(220lbs) of fish feed. Attached at the
bottom of the barrel is a control box
that determines how much feed is
dispensed to the fish in the ponds. To
use the machine, farmers downloaded an
eFishery app, and input the feeding
timings and the amount of feed to be
given. (Suganda said he was never asked
by Gibran to inflate any numbers.)
“The fish ponds are huge. So you have to
walk from one end to the other. When you
have technology, what it did for me was
it gave me a life beyond the farm,” the
54-year-old told Bloomberg News on a
recent visit. “Before that my life was
all about being in the farm. But with
the auto feeder, I could go out, attend
weddings, have a social life.”
The collaboration with eFishery also
facilitated around $150,000 in loans,
helping Suganda and other farmers in his
Cirebon collective to grow. The number
of ponds soared from 10 to 70, and his
income rose by 20%, earning him up to
$603 a month.
This progress came at a time in the
world of startup investing when firms
were looking for more help-the-world
ideas. Assets in sustainable funds
soared 67% to almost $1.7 trillion in
2020,
according
to Morningstar, as investors hunted for
deals with social and environmental
impact. Add in Gibran’s rags-to-riches
personal story and improving financial
statements, eFishery had all the
hallmarks of a rising star. In 2020,
Gibran took on a $20 million Series B
fundraising round co-led by private
equity fund Northstar Group and
Go-Ventures (now Argor Capital).
Northstar and Argor declined to comment.
Money and Pride
At this stage, according to Gibran,
eFishery didn’t need any more money. The
pandemic even gave him the perfect way
to reconcile the books; investors
expected sales to suffer but the
business was actually enjoying a genuine
tailwind. By spinning a story about
faltering growth, he planned to catch
the real numbers up.
That’s when he got word that SoftBank
founder Masayoshi Son wanted to speak.
It was 2021, at the height of the Covid
pandemic. He wouldn’t be able to show
the SoftBank team around selected fish
farms in Indonesia that used his
product, as he’d done with previous
investors. All he had was an hour.
Sitting in his Bandung office, Gibran
was nervous. Just a few years ago he was
raising fish out of a rural farm in
Indonesia, and now SoftBank — which had
raised almost $100 billion for startup
deals through its Vision Fund — was
ready to validate his faith in
eFishery’s future. The firm had
backed
China’s Alibaba Group Holding Ltd.,
Yahoo Japan. and Singapore’s Grab
Holdings Ltd., then one of the hottest
startups in Southeast Asia. Today, it
was interested in him.
Son, listening in from his house in
Tokyo, stopped the pitch just 15 minutes
in, Gibran recounts. He was in.
SoftBank’s team later sent around a term
sheet that valued the business at around
$200 million. Gibran was ecstatic.
SoftBank declined to comment, but a
person familiar with the matter
confirmed the proposed valuation.
Then, out of the blue, Sequoia India and
Southeast Asia (Peak XV) sent its own
proposal with a valuation of just over
$300 million. Investors from Singapore’s
multibillion-dollar, state-owned
investor Temasek also tried to get an
allocation. One day Gibran opened his
WhatsApp to find a text from Temasek’s
Chief Executive Officer Dilhan Pillay,
which he initially thought was spam.
Pillay asked for some time to chat.
Gibran had heard that Pillay rarely
calls founders to pitch. “It was a big
deal,” he said.
Temasek and Peak XV declined to comment.
Though he reveled in the attention his
young startup was getting, he also spent
quiet nights brooding about its shaky
foundations. In 2021, eFishery told
investors that it had booked 1.6
trillion rupiah ($95.3 million) in
revenue, with 142 billion rupiah profit
before tax. In actuality, revenue was
40% lower at 958 billion rupiah with a
loss before tax of 164 billion rupiah.
Gibran said he was uncomfortable with
the deceit, but his mind went back to
the trolley problem. After all, he saw
how some farmers benefitted from
eFishery’s presence. He believed his
startup made an impact. But taking this
money would mean more pressure to grow,
and reconciling the differences between
eFishery’s two books would have to take
a back seat. He was torn.
After the flurry of interest, SoftBank,
Temasek and Sequoia India settled on an
offer of $90 million in fresh funding at
a
$410 million
valuation, according to Gibran, people
familiar with the deal and the research
service
Alternatives.pe. It was a hefty sum for a young
startup at the time, particularly one
helmed by an inexperienced former fish
salesman based in Indonesia. eFishery,
worth just $12 million three years
prior, was
getting the recognition
of the biggest investors in the world.
He took the deal.
Missed Red Flags
In hindsight, there were warning signs.
The Singapore holding company ceased
filing annual financial statements for
years (the 2020 report wasn’t filed
until 2024). More indicative was the
lack of disruption in markets where
eFishery claimed to be making waves. By
the end of 2023, the firm supposedly had
over 300,000 feeding units in the field
and more than 44,000 fish and shrimp
farmers buying from its platform, which
should’ve had a seismic impact on the
entire supply chain.
But when one investor with ties to feed
producers tried to connect them with
eFishery — a clear win-win for both
parties — they were ghosted by Gibran.
Another said Gibran was often three
months or more late with basic numbers
and that a party responsible for
producing key components for the feeder
told them it only supplied enough for at
most 5,000 units per year. A separate
investor was told by senior executives
at Indonesia’s biggest fish feed
distributors that they were confused by
the total lack of change on their sales.
Following his Series C funding round,
the claims and targets were so big that
Gibran said he needed larger farmers
with over $1 million in annual revenue
for his existing method of inflation to
make sense. By now he’d scoured the
country and couldn’t find enough to get
on board.
In early 2022, Gibran says an employee
suggested a solution. By setting up a
web of subsidiaries and controlling the
accounts of farmers on the network, the
business became so complex that
transactions could be padded at will.
Eventually this would expand to five
separate companies with, Gibran says,
over 5,000 accounts being used for
transactions such as buying fish feed
and selling fish.
In the meantime, he was burning through
real money trying to catch up with the
claims he’d given investors. The lending
platform was popular with fish farmers —
both the checks and the collections were
relatively lax — but this also led to
soaring default rates. And the app was
proving to have substantial issues,
which meant hiring field teams and sales
matchers across the country.
By this point, the fake numbers made
eFishery seem supercharged. It became a
focus of write-ups in the international
press, including
Bloomberg News. Gibran expanded to India and quickly
started reporting a profit, apparently
proving the business model could go
global. Abu Dhabi-based sovereign fund
42X led a Series D funding round that
raised $200 million at a $1.4 billion
valuation. Malaysian pension fund
Kumpulan Wang Persaraan (KWAP) was one
of the investors.
eFishery's Rise
As more top money managers
invested, the startup's
valuation soared
Source: eFishery,
Alternatives.pe
Through all of these raisings, eFishery
had gone through reviews by some of the
world’s leading specialist investors and
audit firms. Grant Thornton audited 2022
annual financial statements on the
Indonesian entity while PwC was just a
week away from signing off on the
latest, according to three people
familiar with the matter.
A spokesperson for Grant Thornton said
they were aware and deeply concerned
about the allegations surrounding
eFishery and are working to understand
the full extent of the situation. He
added the company is committed to
maintaining audit quality and integrity.
PwC Indonesia declined to comment and
referred to a previous
statement
on its website which said it had never
issued an independent audit report for
any eFishery company.
For the Series B fundraising, according
to Gibran, 20 separate farmers were
visited while around 70 farmers were
checked for the Series C fundraising.
But he said the firms doing the due
diligence, whose identities Bloomberg
hasn’t confirmed, drew from a database
of farms provided by eFishery and told
the startup which they planned to visit,
aside from a relatively small number of
random spot checks. This gave Gibran a
chance to prepare the ground. Gibran
says that local area managers were given
fact sheets detailing the numbers to
tell visitors and they in turn briefed
farmers; the rest was left to luck.
The same problems that make Indonesia
such a challenging market can also
hamper attempts to audit companies. The
country is made up of over 17,000
islands and much of the work is done in
rural settings where even detailed
addresses aren’t enough, requiring help
from farmers just to reach the front
door.
The Fall
Despite the hype being fed to investors,
some people within the company were
aware of the true situation. According
to Gibran and several former employees,
the vast majority of its workforce only
had the internal set of books and never
knew that external money managers had a
totally different set of numbers.
At this stage, with investors being sold
a tale of slowing growth to concentrate
on being financially sustainable ahead
of a public listing, Gibran made plans
to try and fix the business. He labelled
it Project MEGA — Make eFishery Great
Again.
It was a Hail Mary, one former employee
said. Draft proposals reviewed by
Bloomberg News showed that eFishery
hoped to more than halve its losses
before tax to 107 billion rupiah, reduce
overdue loans on its Kabayan program and
get more farmers to use its technology.
The company also wanted more farmers to
buy and sell more fish through them. But
they had a mountain to climb: Out of
over 28,000 fish and shrimp farmers in
their Kabayan system, about half were
inactive. Another 7,000 had frozen
accounts, the documents showed.
Meanwhile, more than 90% of eFishery’s
revenue came from businesses with less
than 2% of gross profit margin.
The trigger for the collapse, according
to a subsequent internal
report, was a whistleblower complaint
alleging financial misconduct sent to a
board member in late November 2024. But
some former employees suggest the
circumstances could’ve been more mundane
— copies of internal numbers had been
sent to a director around then so it may
have initially been a case of two
confused individuals trying to
understand why their numbers were so
different.
On Dec. 6, Gibran said he was called in
by the board, who informed him they had
received documents from a whistleblower
that showed differences in revenue as
well as the number of tech products used
by farmers.
He went back home and reflected. “That
was the, I think the scariest part, the
most unstable phase of myself,” he said.
He couldn’t sleep that night, Gibran
said. He was sad for what happened, and
afraid, for what was to come.
On the afternoon of Dec. 9, Gibran
gathered his heads of departments at a
meeting room on the third floor of the
company’s headquarters. Some 14 of them
sat around a large oval table, while
Gibran stood in front, by the side of
the room. He told them what had
happened. Some of the senior managers
already knew of the inflated figures,
Gibran told Bloomberg News. Others
didn’t. At that meeting, which lasted
around two to three hours, he fielded
questions and then departed without
knowing whether the company would
continue in some form.
“There’s still hope but not for me. I
know that this is the end of my chapter
at the very least,” he said.
On Dec. 11, Gibran said he came clean to
Novogratz, the co-founder of Aqua-Spark
and one of eFishery’s board members, in
a 30-minute recorded Zoom call. She was
one of the company’s first investors and
he regarded her as a mentor. Novogratz
seemed gravely disappointed in him,
Gibran recounted.
A couple of days later on Dec. 13,
Gibran was summoned by the Steering
Committee of eFishery's board and told
he would be suspended. A new interim
chief executive and chief financial
officer took control of eFishery,
including its bank accounts.
The Fallout
Sometime in the middle of December,
things at Suganda’s fish farm in Cirebon
began to fall apart. One by one, the
eFeeders in his collective broke down.
Normally he would seek help from an
eFishery technician who was always on
standby but when Suganda called, the
technician said he had been laid off and
there was no one left.
By the time Bloomberg News visited the
farm on a cloudy Tuesday in the middle
of March, a mix of working and stagnant
ponds dotted the silent plain,
punctuated only by the afternoon call to
prayer and occasional motorcycle.
The eFishery devices stood abandoned in
place, over a decade of tech development
and global funding now little more than
dumb buckets used to store fishing nets
or feed. Suganda’s back to manual labor,
forcing him to downsize the number of
ponds he can manage. His monthly income
has dwindled to around $180 at best,
having been forced to sell much of his
inventory at reduced prices.
“Without it, it is a huge loss. Labor
efficiency is lost,” he said of the
feeders. “Tech helped me to have a
social life. But now I’m back to just
overseeing the ponds.”
And for Indonesia itself, where markets
are
already spooked
over the populist policies of the new
president, the demise of a poster-child
company risks dampening the flow of new
capital, reawakening questions about
whether the traditional venture
capitalist model really works in
emerging markets.
“In the next one or two years, there
will be a slowdown of $50 million to
$100 million checks,” said Weisheng Neo,
partner at Southeast Asia venture
capital firm Qualgro Partners. “These
investors aren’t going to go away
entirely, but they’re just not going to
invest in similar companies for a while
— those that are super heavy on
execution, with not much core assets and
with a high cash burn.”
Investors are still debating how to wrap
the company up. The board has hired FTI
Consulting Singapore Pte. to review the
business and take over management of the
company. In a presentation to investors,
seen by Bloomberg News, it concluded
that “eFishery is not commercially
viable in its current form.” FTI has
recommended the business be wound down
and what money is left returned to
investors. There isn’t much. For
example, Abu Dhabi’s 42X, which invested
$100 million in the April 2023 round,
may get just $8.3 million back
two years later.
FTI declined to comment. Lunate, which
now manages 42X's assets, declined to
comment.
The company has all but folded with the
vast majority of staff laid off and many
of its machines being scrapped by
recyclers for about $6 each, according
to people familiar with the matter. The
illusion that Gibran built over 13 years
took less than three months to collapse.
One lingering question is what exactly
happened to all the money. Although the
FTI report does suggest that some
employees siphoned money, and Gibran
drew a salary and bonus commensurate
with a much larger company, he seems to
live a fairly modest life. One employee
said he used to drive to the office in a
Hyundai Ioniq 5. Indonesia’s corporate
history is replete with tycoons fleeing
abroad with millions of investor dollars
but he remains in Bandung — the
second-tier city where he based the
startup to save on costs. None of his
detractors has produced evidence he
embezzled money.
Gibran swears he didn’t take the missing
funds. He says it all went to hiring
talent, allocating commissions and
paying off debtors.
But while the founder talks of weighing
the moral ledger, despite all his
reasonings and philosophical
justifications, there were countless
opportunities for him to come clean or
cease accepting new money. The fatal
flaw in his trolley problem analogy is
that he could’ve hit the brakes and
choose to run over no one.
Gibran’s own future, right now, looks
like his past. He’s working with his
shrimp-farming brother and has started a
frozen food business. And he’s trying to
support efforts by former staff to
create new fish farming collectives.
Longer term, it is more murky. The
Indonesian police didn’t respond to a
request for comment on the status of any
investigation, but the inquiry by FTI is
still ongoing and he faces possible
legal action from investors, according
to people familiar with the matter.
As for why he did it, the answer seems
to be a mix of desperation, ego and
circumstance.
“In hindsight I wanted to create a big
impact — to create a dent in the
universe — without thinking if my impact
should instead be long-lasting, even if
it’s smaller," he said.
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